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FROM SLUMS TO SLUMS IN THREE
GENERATIONS; HOUSING POLICY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE WELFARE STATE,
1945-2005.

Harold Carter

University of Oxford

Abstract

Housing was =
the
major domestic priority of all postwar UK governments.By 1970 the physical conditions of
British housing had been transformed; by the 1990s seventy per cent of
households in England owned their own homes.Yet in 2012 there were still parts=
of
many cities that deserved labeling as slums. Why had massive public expendi=
ture
not managed to achieve the goal of successive governments?

Vested
interests, created by each wave of intervention, limited subsequent policy
choices.From about 1950 to a=
bout
1995, governments expanded owner occupation via a wide range of subsidies, =
but
increasingly restricted the supply of land by restrictive planning laws. Th=
ere
was a massive (and unremarked) tenurial revolut=
ion,
as privately rented houses were sold off to owner occupiers. At the same ti=
me,
slum clearance created large single-tenure areas. This changed the nature of
the demand for council housing(once occupied by the upper
skilled working-class). In some parts of the country, gentrification remove=
d a
once-affordable source of owner-occupied housing.But rent control meant there were =
few
homes for would-be renters. Access to good quality social housing thus beca=
me a
very high-stakes game, for those on modest incomes – and a major sour=
ce
of ethnic tension in some inner cities.

From the mid 1980s on, means-tested help with rent payments and
market liberalization&=
nbsp;
provided new help to would-be private renters. By 2010 this h=
ad
resulted in the provision of over 2.2 million new privately rented dwelling=
s in
under twenty years&nbs=
p;
(almost as many as had vanished between 1960 and 1975).Small debt-funded capitalist landl=
ords,
and tenants with limited security of tenure, would have been familiar one
hundred years earlier. But this time the government was paying the rent;
guaranteeing the market for a new generation of slum landlords, while produ=
cing
severe disincentives to labour-market participa=
tion
by the poor.This new form of
subsidy (coupled with continuing high land prices) helped to increase nomin=
al
rents much faster than average earnings. Housing benefit expenditure rose £11 billion in 2000 to £22 billion in
2010.

As, on the
surface, the British housing market moved away from social democracy and
towards market liberalism, its underpinnings moved in the opposite
direction.Measure was =
piled
on measure, and subsidy on subsidy, until at the end of the century the
influence of government had become all-pervasive.

Social
amelioration of this kind faces two major problems.The first problem is that it tends=
to
reward the majority at the expense of the weak. The second great problem is
that it depends on a continuing flow of new resources, to fix each new prob=
lem
while still maintaining preserving the interests of existing clients.If liberal democracies survive by
buying-off trouble from new problems, while continuing to support accrued v=
ested
interests, how will they manage if economic growth can no longer be relied
upon? Based on the experience of the UK housing market, it seems likely that
they will focus their resources on those in the middle. This does not bode =
well
for the poor.